Conference on Polish Literature since 1989 to be held at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies 10-11 November 2011, with introductory symposium dedicated to Czesław Miłosz on 9 November (evening event).
Supported by the Polish Cultural Institute, London (co-organizers), The Book Institute, Kraków, the Zdanowicz Fund, Trinity College Cambridge, and the SSEES Centre for the Study of Central Europe.

Closure of Conference project. Post-Conference Plans

Many many thanks to everyone who participated in the conference, to all those who presented papers, read their poetry or translations, contributed to discussions or just came to listen.

This blog will remain open as a record of the conference proceedings and will continue to include the programme, the abstracts of the presentations and the short biographies of the participants.

We have removed the conference papers from this site because we intend to include revised versions in a post-conference book. This book will not be a representation of the conference proceedings as such, however, but a volume of articles roughly reflecting the structure of the conference. The book will be edited by Ursula Philips, supported by a team of advisers (Urszula Chowaniec, Knut Andreas Grimstad, Kris Van Heuckelom and Elwira Grossman). It is expected that the volume will appear in 2013.

Should anyone wish to contact the authors of papers or read the original papers, please contact the conference organizer.

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Richard Reisner

The World of Czesław Miłosz: Bombus Terrestris in the Authorial Honeycomb of Translators and Translated

This paper proposes that Czesław Miłosz in his numerous literary guises epitomises the cross-pollinatory nature of the creative literary process where texts are generated polytemporaneously in the authorial process of readers and writers. One such illustration, his early war-time cycle The World, can be shown to demonstrate the generative nature of literary creation in the intertextual plane, translation being a prime vehicle in the cross-pollination of the initial text, known as the original.

In this regard one poem from Miłosz’s cycle ‘The World’ will be taken as an illustration, where two English versions are discussed in terms of the roles of readers and writers in the authorial process across time. In this particular context, Miłosz as both author/translated and author/translator plays a vital role in exemplifying the making of authorial progression and the related creativity of the translation text in the formative process of literature.

It is therefore argued that Czesław Miłosz, working across a number of literary genres as well as assuming a number of various guises in the course of being reader and writer, serves as a good illustration of the making of the author and the attendant creative tensions between readers and writers. It is therefore both as translator and translated that one of Poland’s most influential literary figures in the recent past has underscored the authorial presence of translation in the re-generation of literature.

Friends

Search This Blog

Our site

This is the website of the Conference on Polish Literature Since 1989. Here you can find here all information about the programme, abstracts and the short biographies of the participants. Full papers will be posted here about three weeks before the conference